What Pakistan Thinks of Zero Dark Thirty

Director/producer Kathryn Bigelow during the premiere of ‘Zero Dark Thirty’ in Hollywood, California.

The movie “Zero Dark Thirty” has created controversy in the U.S. over its depiction of the Central Intelligence Agency’s 10-year hunt for Osama bin Laden, who was shot dead in the Pakistani town of Abbottabad in 2011.

So what does Pakistan make of the movie?

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Most Pakistanis will never have the chance to decide for themselves. The nation’s movie distributors are boycotting it because, they say, they don’t want to show a movie about an episode they view as humiliating to their nation.

Navy Seals killed the al Qaeda leader in a nighttime raid that Pakistan officials say they knew nothing about – and which took place in a town that is full of military training institutions.

“We have not, and neither has anyone else, bought Zero Dark Thirty,” said Mohsin Yaseen, a representative for film distribution company Cinepax. “It has several scenes which could make us feel humiliated. It is against the interests of the Pakistani nation,” said Mr. Yaseen.

He described the film as “pro-American” despite depictions of so-called “enhanced interrogation techniques,” which have been widely viewed as torture.

It is those scenes that have stirred controversy in the U.S., with three senators calling the film “grossly inaccurate and misleading in its suggestion that torture resulted in information” that led to bin Laden’s capture.

The film claims to be based on first-hand accounts of actual events gathered through months of interviews with CIA officials and contractors. A committee headed by Sen. Dianne Feinstein (Democrat of California) has been formed to determine if the CIA granted inappropriate access to the filmmakers. Mark Boal, the writer of Zero Dark Thirty, has accused the lawmakers of launching a McCarthy-esque probe against the film that would stifle free speech.

In Pakistan, boycotts of controversial material are hardly new. YouTube in the country has been blocked for four months over a trailer for the film, “Innocence of Muslims,” which has been criticized as anti-Islam.

The Central Board of Film Censors of Pakistan said it had not reviewed “Zero Dark Thirty” because there has been no request to do so.

The film is, however, available in many pirate DVD shops in the capital, Islamabad.

“It has been very popular with Westerners and Pakistanis,” said the owner of one shop in the F/7 market. He declined to give his name.

Other DVD shops have pulled the film from their shelves after the boycott was announced.

Kaleen Abbasi, 25 years old, who works at a DVD shop in the same F/7 market, said that the shop was no longer selling the film because it was negative about Pakistan.

He added that he had not seen it, but agreed that any film that portrayed the country badly should not be available.

Pakistani commentators have seized on the film even though it is not being officially distributed.

Nadeem Paracha, senior columnist for Dawn Newspaper, one of Pakistan’s leading English-language newspapers, catalogued what he considered flaws in its depiction of Pakistani society in a blog post on Thursday.

He went on to suggest, through a series of comic photographs, that the Oscar-nominated film reinforces American and Pakistani stereotypes about each other.

Similarly, Dawn’s film critic, Mohammad Kamran Jawaid, in a freewheeling and, at times, contradictory review, suggested that viewers’ response to the film would depend “on the individual’s level of hurt.”

In a review for the Express Tribune, Noman Ansari, a freelance writer, sought to add some perspective.

“Yes, Zero Dark Thirty portrays a dark corner of Pakistan, but the film never claims that this is all there is to the country,” the piece said. “It doesn’t have to, because this is a film about the hunt for Osama Bin Laden, and not about Pakistan’s glorious win at the cricket world cup. And like it or not, our national army was completely clueless about an operation by a foreign military on its own soil, near its own naval compound.”

It added: “So if Zero Dark Thirty makes us look completely incompetent and stupid when it came to the events of May 2, 2011, perhaps it is because we were.”

The raid depicted in the movie caused huge consternation among ordinary Pakistanis when it happened, according to a survey. In a poll conducted by YouGov in association with Polis at Cambridge University shortly after the raid, 75% of Pakistani respondents said they disapproved of the U.S. operation and 66% didn’t believe that Osama Bin Laden had been killed at the compound in Abbottabad.

The association between bin Laden and Abbottabad continues to rankle residents of the town.

“I am disappointed that my town harbored a terrorist who had caused damage to my country,” said a 31-year-old woman in Abbottabad, who declined to be named. “My town is now notorious. My cousins in Canada no longer tell people that they are from Abbottabad.”

But when she was whether Zero Dark Thirty should be shown in Pakistan, she said: “Pakistanis watch Indian movies and, if you read the Pakistani press, we are led to believe that they are the enemy, too.”

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